Annually, underground mining of valuable materials is the cause of numerous injuries to and deaths of mine personnel. Governments worldwide have enacted restrictive and wide-ranging regulations to protect the safety of mine personnel. The resulting measures required to comply with the regulations have been a contributing cause of significant increases in underground mining costs. Further increases in mining costs are attributable to global increases in labor costs generally. Increases in mining costs have caused numerous low grade deposits to be uneconomic to mine and therefore caused high rates of inflation in consumer products.
To reduce mining costs and provide for increased personnel safety, a vast amount of research has been performed to develop a mining machine that can excavate materials continuously and remotely. Although success has been realized in developing machines to mine materials continuously in soft deposits, such as coal, soda ash, talc, and other sedimentary materials, there continue to be problems in developing a machine to mine materials continuously in hard deposits, such as igneous and metamorphic materials. A primary problem to developing a continuous mining machine in hard materials has been an unacceptably high rate of cutter bit wear.
Development of a remotely operable or fully automatic machine has been problematic in both soft and hard deposits. The currently available logic necessary to provide for full or partial automation is relatively crude. The ability to precisely locate the machine with reference to the orebody has also been difficult, leading to unacceptably high rates of dilution of excavated ore with barren country rock. Precise, real-time, and simultaneous location of the orebody and the mining machine is extremely important to ensure that each cut of the mining machine is optimal relative to the exposed ore-bearing zone.